Radio Failures Alarm Air Controllers

June 19, 1990|By Gary Washburn, Transportation writer.

A regional air traffic control center in Aurora that handles more than 2 million flights a year has suffered radio communication glitches more than 500 times so far this year, compromising safety and causing delays, officials of the union representing workers there charged Monday.

Moreover, six of about 40 ``sectors`` of airspace at the facility have suffered total radio failure over the last year, leaving air traffic controllers and pilots with no way to communicate, said James Poole, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association chapter at the facility.

The problems of aging radio equipment, lack of adequate backup systems, lack of funding and bureaucratic delays in making repairs and improvements have become so serious that the union has decided to make them public, union officials said.

Mort Edelstein, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, acknowledged some problems at the center, but he said the FAA is taking steps to correct them.

Nevertheless, agency experts have deemed the communication system to be safe, Edelstein said.

He contended that there has been no case in the last three years of loss of proper separation between planes due to radio problems.

Poole said the duration of the communication blackouts in the six airspace sectors ranged from about two minutes to about two hours. They came after failure of three separate systems, primary, standby and a ``backup emergency communication`` known as BUEC, he said.

``The air traffic system is extremely safe when everything is working,``

said Mark Scholl, chairman of the union chapter`s safety committee.

``When you can`t talk to the airplanes, the system is not safe. . . . If you lose the frequency at a busy time, when you have 18 or 20 planes, you can`t shoot up a flare. We sit there panicky and watch the problem.``

With total radio failure, controllers must scramble to find another frequency, then hope that pilots in their airspace are able to learn of the switch by talking to other controllers, union officials said. Jet planes typically travel through a sector in a matter of minutes.

The union officials blamed faulty communications for the near collision outside Detroit last September of a Trans World Airlines jet and an Air Force tanker. The passenger plane dived to miss the military jet, apparently after the TWA pilot responded to a controller`s instructions meant for another craft.

Poole acknowledged that such incidents are infrequent, but attributed that to good controller training and pure luck.

The Aurora facility, known officially as the Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center, handles planes over the central Midwest, including those bound for and taking off from O`Hare International, Midway and other local airports. Delays are a common byproduct of the radio problems, according to the union. Planes are sometimes put in holding patterns when glitches develop, and if the primary and standby systems on a frequency are down, controllers relying on the BUEC may require greater distances between planes just in case that system also malfunctions, union officials said.

Poole said that, if he personally is operating with BUEC, he will advise controllers from the adjacent regional control center feeding him traffic to increase the space between planes from 10 miles to 20.

Poole and Scholl said that old equipment has not been replaced in anticipation of new hardware that was to have been installed in 1989 but now is not expected to be operational until at least 1995.

Underfunding and FAA paperwork delays also have played a part in the problem, they said.

Edelstein asserted that communications improvements at the center have been ``extensive`` since April of 1987. The FAA has earmarked $740,000 to upgrade radio channels, and the work is to be completed by November, he said. ``Further, in 1986 we replaced all the radio control equipment with solid-state digital control equipment at a cost of $350,000,`` he said.

Union leaders also assailed the FAA`s lack of redundancy in telephone lines that provide vital links in the communications system. The Aurora center is connected by Illinois Bell lines to remote locations that house radio transmitters. A controller`s instructions are carried via phone cable to the transmitter where they are broadcast to planes.

A cut or damaged cable can cause big problems. On June 1, the lone line connecting controllers at Aurora with those at O`Hare was severed, delaying flights to and from Chicago for as long as 90 minutes.

Aging radio equipment and phone line outages are a problem nationally, said Bud Long, assistant to the president of the Professional Airways Systems Specialists, the union that represents FAA repair technicians.

``We think we do a very good job with the equipment we have on line,``

Long said. ``Even though the FAA is attempting to modernize, we`re still tied to some antiquated systems.``

And, ``when a land line gets interrupted, it gets interrupted,`` he said. ``It certainly (would) make sense to have redundancy.``